There may not yet be a drunken monkey on the bar menu, but there is a spider monkey, a drink made with creme de banana, Kahlua and ice cream.

But this is about real drunken monkeys, the kind that are presumed to lurch through the forest after eating certain fermenting fruits.

A University of California at Berkeley professor has advanced what is being called the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis in which he suggests that humans are genetically disposed to ethanol. Fruit, particularly in the tropics, frequently ferments and produces ethanol, a type of drinking alcohol.

The professor, Robert Dudley, outlined his ideas in a 2004 academic article and a 2005 book.

But no one has really discussed the topic with monkeys.

The health benefits of low-level alcohol consumption are consistent with an ancient and potentially adaptive exposure to this common, psychoactive substance, suggests the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The institute is where another California professor and a graduate student are testing this hypothesis.

The institute identified her as Christina Campbell, associate professor of anthropology at California State University Northridge. She has been studying spider monkeys since 1996 and will be checking the alcohol content of Spondias mombin, a mango relative extremely important in the monkeys’ diet, said the institute.

They will be in the field attempting to get samples of the fruit and from the monkeys for more than a year, the institute said.

Dudley has said via the academic literature that understanding the primate's attraction to alcohol might be important to understanding human abuse of liquor.

Frank Buck, the famous early 20th century animal collector, has reported that natives in Asia used to capture powerful adult orangutans by making available in the jungle large tubs of alcohol. The orangutan quickly gulped down the drink and collapsed into a drunken sleep, thus making capture easy.

Primates have been eating fermented fruit for 40 million years, said the Smithsonian. That means ingesting alcohol may give some kind of evolutionary advantage to the drinker. That's a good excuse, anyway.

Chiquito has only seen Olivier six times over the past eighteen months, when Olivier comes to do his quarterly inspection as our regent biologist. Nevertheless, he's one of Chiquito's favorite people. Chiquito greets Olivier by offering him a pectoral sniff...the ultimate spider monkey embrace. Eye contact, which would be rude, is carefully avoided by both parties.

We had two young women visit today, Melissa who is a Tica from San Ramon, and Haley Hill Pearson, an American who is on her dream visit to Costa Rica, photographing and volunteering with wildlife. Lolita was equally fascinated by Melissa's colorful head scarf and Haley's SLR camera, and it made me feel badly that we aren't giving Lolita more mental stimulation. Spider monkeys are believed to be second only to orangutans on the intelligence hierarchy of non-human primates. The problem is that we don't want Lolita to become habituated to human culture, or to at least keep her exposure to a minimum, so that she can be successfully rehabilitated back into the wild.

Melissa was wearing the scarf on her hair, so Lolita attempted to put it on her own head. Haley was looking through the camera, so Lolita peered into it also...albeit the wrong end.

Michele Gawenka

Jane Goodall has always been my hero, and working with primates an aspiration. Africa wasn't in the cards the summer I turned 16, when my parents offered to send me to volunteer, and there was only one class (in physical anthro-pology) when I wanted to study primatology in college. Decades later my husband and I retired in Costa Rica, and this is our journey with spider (and howler) monkeys.